DrBubba - Slashdot User

Submission + - Research Discovery Could Revolutionalize Semiconductor Manufacture (lunduniversity.lu.se)

Submitted by arobatino on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @06:08PM

arobatino writes: A new method of manufacturing semiconductors which eliminates the substrate (in other words, no wafer) could be much faster and cheaper. From the article:

'A completely new method of manufacturing the smallest structures in electronics could make their manufacture thousands of times quicker, allowing for cheaper semiconductors. The findings have been published in the latest issue of Nature.

Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.'

Submission + - Bitcoin mining rewards drop to 25 bitcoin (mineforeman.com)

Submitted by

ASDFnz

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @04:05PM

ASDFnz writes: "At 15:24:38 28th of Novemeber 2012 GMT the 210,000th bitcoin block was mined by laughingbear at Slush’s pool https://mining.bitcoin.cz/ .

From now on the reward will only be 25 bitcoins or less. As mentioned in a Slashdot Article http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/11/25/2124236/bitcoin-mining-reward-about-to-halve earlier this week this is a very important milestone in the development of bitcoin, one that may either make or break it."

Submission + - Scientific American's Fred Guterl explores the real threats posed by technology (thebulletin.org)

Submitted by Lasrick on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @02:54PM

Lasrick writes: Fred Guterl is the executive editor of Scientific American, and in this piece he explores various real threats posed by technology that modern civilization relies on. Discusses West African and Indian monsoons, infectious diseases, computer hacking. Here's a quote: "Today the technologies that pose some of the biggest problems are not so much military as commercial. They come from biology, energy production, and the information sciences — and are the very technologies that have fueled our prodigious growth as a species. They are far more seductive than nuclear weapons, and more difficult to extricate ourselves from. The technologies we worry about today form the basis of our global civilization and are essential to our survival."

Submission + - Splashtop For Linux Claims 10~15% Advantage Over VNC (phoronix.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @01:10PM

An anonymous reader writes: The Splashtop remote desktop application software has been ported to Ubuntu Linux. In the port that was announced today, the company claims Splashtop is 10~15% faster than VNC, the commonly used graphical desktop sharing system. The superior performance is attributed to "an efficient protocol, algorithms and optimizations." While non-free proprietary software, the Linux Foundation is also promoting Splashtop coming to Linux.

Submission + - Elon Musk outlines SpaceX's Mars settlement plans (space.com)

Submitted by McGruber on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @11:06AM

McGruber writes: Space.com (http://www.space.com/18596-mars-colony-spacex-elon-musk.html) has the news of Alon Musk's November 16 talk at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Musk outlined SpaceX's plans to establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by staring with a pioneering group of fewer than 10 people.

Submission + - In the midst of privacy scandal, Facebook creates another scandal (bbc.co.uk)

Submitted by

muon1183

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @10:52AM

muon1183 writes: "Facebook says it is investigating a fault which has seen some of its members re-registered to groups that they had quit. This is especially disturbing for 'secret' groups, as it can result in people gaining access to data they should not have."

Submission + - Caltech and UVic set 339Gbps internet speed record (extremetech.com) 1

Submitted by

MrSeb

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:52AM

MrSeb writes: "Engineers at Caltech and the University of Victoria in Canada have smashed their own internet speed records, achieving a memory-to-memory transfer rate of 339 gigabits per second (5.3GB/s), 187Gbps (2.9GB/s) over a single duplex 100-gigabit connection, and a max disk-to-disk transfer speed of 96Gbps (1.5GB/s). At a sustained rate of 339Gbps, such a network could transfer four million gigabytes (4PB) of data per day — or around 200,000 Blu-ray movie rips. These speed records are all very impressive, but what’s the point? Put simply, the scientific world deals with vasts amount of data — and that data needs to be moved around the world quickly. The most obvious example of this is CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; in the past year, the high-speed academic networks connecting CERN to the outside world have transferred more than 100 petabytes of data. It is because of these networks that we can discover new particles, such as the Higgs boson. In essence, Caltech and the University of Victoria have taken it upon themselves to ride the bleeding edge of high-speed networks so that science can continue to prosper."

Submission + - Using nanoparticles to boil water for less £ (technologyreview.com)

Submitted by

vswee

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:51AM

vswee writes: "Generating steam, typically requires vast amounts of energy to heat and eventually boil water or another fluid. Now researchers at Rice University have found a shortcut. Using light-absorbing nanoparticles suspended in water, the group was able to turn the water molecules surrounding the nanoparticles into steam while scarcely raising the temperature of the remaining water. The trick could dramatically reduce the cost of many steam-reliant processes."

Submission + - Curiosity may have found precursor of life on Mars (lagazzettadelmezzogiorno.it)

Submitted by

concealment

on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:28AM

concealment writes: "NASA's Curiosity rover may have found a precursor to life on Mars, the director of the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Wednesday.
"Perhaps Curiosity has found simple organic molecules," Charles Elachi said at the fringes of a conference at Rome's La Sapienza University.
"It's preliminary data that must be checked (on) organic, not biological, molecules"."

Submission + - BP and Executive Facing Criminal Charges (chron.com) 1

Submitted by SleazyRidr on Wednesday November 28, 2012 @09:07AM

SleazyRidr writes: Finally some news that will please a lot of the Slashdot crowd: A company has been charged with Manslaughter! BP has been charged with manslaughter following the Macondo Incident. Two of the rig supervisors and a BP executive are also facing jail time. Is this the start of companies being forced to take responsibility for their actions?

Submission + - Why Coding at Fifty May be Nifty 4

Submitted by theodp on Saturday November 03, 2012 @08:10PM

theodp writes: Enough with the dadgum naysayers. Google's Vivek Haldar lists some good reasons for why you would want to program at fifty (or any other age). Haldar's list would probably get a thumbs-up from billionaire SAS CEO Jim Goodnight, who had this to say about coding when interviewed at age 56: 'I would be happy if I just stayed in my office and programmed all day, to tell you the truth. That is my one real love in life is programming. Programming is sort of like getting to work a puzzle all day long. I actually enjoy it. It's a lot of fun. It's not even work to me. It's just enjoyable. You get to shut out all your other thoughts and just concentrate on this little thing you're trying to do, to make work it. It's nice, very enjoyable.'

Submission + - Dragonfly BSD 3.2 released (dragonflybsd.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03, 2012 @07:06PM

An anonymous reader writes: Dragonfly BSD recently announced the release of version 3.2 of their operating system. Improvements include: USB4BSD, a second-generation USB stack; merging of a GSoC project to provide CPU topology awareness to the scheduler, giving a nice boost for hyperthreading Intel CPUs; and last but not least, a new largely rewritten scheduler.

Some background is in order for the last one. PostgreSQL 9.3 will move from SysV shared memory to mmap for its shared memory needs. It turned out that the switch much hurts its performance on the BSDs. Matthew Dillon was fast to respond with a search for bottlenecks and got the performance up to par with Linux.

Submission + - Was saving this data center worth the risk? (computerworld.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs on Saturday November 03, 2012 @02:51PM

dcblogs writes: The effort to keep a data center running in a flood damaged building at 75 Broad St. in lower Manhattan is certainly inspiring. The basement was flooded, disabling a fuel pumping system that supplied a generator on the roof. Customers and data center staff carried fuel up 17 flights of steps, via a bucket brigade, to keep a rooftop generator running. They clearly saved the day. But was it worth the risk? This building was either directly in the evacuation zone or on the cusp.The flood waters reached a height of four feet in the lobby, so it is fair to say that the building was clearly in a high risk area and flooding was anticipated. What was the condition of the building fire suppression systems? Was the fire alarm system operational? What if a fuel bucket had been dropped and fuel spilled down the steps?

Submission + - Apple: Brits too thick for Javascript; hides statement off the edge of homepage. (apple.com)

Submitted by rtfa-troll on Saturday November 03, 2012 @08:54AM

rtfa-troll writes: If you had already been ticked off for failing to follow a court order properly, you would be careful not to mess up this time, wouldn't you? Well, maybe not if you are not a big corporation. After being caught misleading people about it's designs Apple was ordered to clearly state that "the Galaxy Tab 10.1, Tab 8.9 and Tab 7.7 do not infringe Apple’s Community registered design". First time around they actually included further misleading statements on the same page as their correction leading to headlines such as APPLE: SCREW YOU, BRITS, everyone else says Samsung copied us actually being shown by Samsung in court. This time round, Apple was ordered to put up some text on their homepage. Technically the correction is part of the homepage HTML, however, if you go and look at Apple's UK homepage you will find that a clever piece of Javascript which resizes the headline product image means that for any normal consumer screen, you will never actually see the notice without manually scrolling past the end of the normal legal messages. How far can Apple push and get away with it?

Submission + - Winged Dragon Trains (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by kgeiger on Saturday October 20, 2012 @05:31PM

kgeiger writes: Reviving a 1980s Japanese idea, engineers at Beijing's Beihang University speculate about building an aero-levitation wheel-rail train (ALWR), Small wings mounted on carbon-fiber carriages loft the vehicle. Wheels serve as guides during cruising-speed "flight" and support the vehicle at low-speeds during station stops. The engineers also envision a low-drag sharkskin exterior to reduce drag. The design saves the expense of building and powering magnetic levitation tracks and has several built-in fail-soft features. Bonus: it looks cool, like a many-winged Chinese dragon snaking along the tracks. Better stay behind the yellow line on the boarding platform.

Slashdot Top Deals